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An onslaught of designated shopping days— Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday—have assaulted our senses, urgently urging us to buy gifts for all of the special people in our lives. Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, it’s easy to pine for the iPad Mini, that 55-inch flatscreen TV, or the latest Kindle. In this season, it’s easy to forget that nearly 4 billion people on our planet live in poverty, on a daily average of less than the cost of one Starbucks specialty coffee.

In the giving spirit of the season, we may be tempted to soothe our enormous cognitive dissonance through charitable contributions. However, for the most part, simply writing a check doesn’t solve the persistent problems of poverty – though it is of vital importance to alleviate the effects of natural and human-created disasters. Academic research has revealed that a small fraction of foreign aid actually reaches intended beneficiaries due to corruption. And wonderful, well-intentioned endeavors to build wells or latrines in less-developed communities often have only ephemeral benefit: there is no one to fix them after the college or church group leaves, with little more lasting relationship than a few snapshots and a meaningful story to tell.

Social entrepreneurs who are serving poor communities with essential goods and services offer an alternative vehicle for giving to the poor with true and enduring impact. I’ve seen firsthand how helping social entrepreneurs succeed can directly lift those entrepreneurs, their customers, and their communities out of poverty.

This kind of giving can take a number of forms. First and foremost, as Laura Arrillaga-Andreeseen describes in her excellent book Giving 2.0, you can give yourself. At Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™), experienced business mentors volunteer their time and expertise throughout the year to help social entrepreneurs develop sustainable business models that can reliably deliver power, water, food, or education to the communities they serve around the planet. Their Silicon Valley acumen of building successful ventures is a gift to these social entrepreneurs, but the GSBI mentors routinely tell me they get much more than they give.

Second, as an investor, you can give up some financial return in exchange for social impact. For social enterprises to scale their delivery of essential goods and services to the poor, they need access to working capital, and they need fair wages. The premise that impact investors can earn market rate returns (whatever that means these days) is fundamentally flawed: social entrepreneurs operate in much more complex environments with poor or nonexistent infrastructure. The risk is significantly higher, as are the diligence costs. When social entrepreneurs deliver power, water, and other goods to poor communities, they create foundations for economic growth, opening frontier markets to other forms of investment.

Third, you can give a loan directly to a poor person. Kiva, a well-known micro-lender that participated in our 2006 GSBI program, has facilitated nearly $400 million in small loans that empower entrepreneurs in the developing world to lift themselves out of poverty. With a 99% repayment rate, Kiva lenders gain tremendous leverage.

Fourth, you can give your firm’s business to enterprises that benefit those living in poverty. Whether you work in a start-up company or a multinational corporation, the choices your organization makes can harm or help those living in poverty. For instance, if your firm outsources work, consider partnering with a social enterprise that lifts people out of poverty. Samasource connects women and youth living in poverty throughout East Africa and South Asia to dignified work on the Internet; Anudip empowers marginalized youth and women in rural India with market-aligned skills training. Not For Sale, based in the Bay Area, fights human trafficking and modern-day slavery around the planet through its work in mainstream supply chains. What better gift than freedom?

These kinds of gifts may not be for everyone. They’re not as easy as plunking down a credit card or picking up a Bed, Bath, & Beyond gift card at Safeway. But my social entrepreneurship students at Santa Clara convince me that the tide is turning, away from a disconnection between our hearts and our careers. Perhaps your heart will turn to the poor this year as well.

Thane Kreineris currently Executive Director of the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University. He has founded and/or served as CEO of PhyloTech, Inc., which conducts comprehensive microbial community analysis for environmental and human health applications; Presage Biosciences, Inc., a Seattle-based company dedicated to bringing better cancer drugs to market; and iZumi Bio, Inc. (now iPierian), a regenerative medicine venture. He spent 14 years at Affymetrix, Inc., which pioneered the DNA chip industry. He holds an MBA and a PhD. In Neurosciences from Stanford University.

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Anything given free to anybody will have no value to the beneficiary. This is well known from the may programmes by AID Agencies and Government. The Beneficiary should put in some sharte so that he has the feeling of taking care of the gadget.

How much of the Foreign Aid reaches the beficiary?

As William Easterly, Economist, Profesoor of Economics, New York University who worked with World Bank to fight poverty says: ”The critical thing that makes foreign aid fail so often – and this is really heartbreaking – is simply that the poor who are the intended customers of foreign aid, just like you are the intended customer of the Pepsi Corporation when they sale you Pepsis . . . But unlike your relationship with Pepsi, the poor have no right to complain and no right to turn down the product if they don’t like it. The poor just get foreign aid foisted on them by these ill-informed “experts”, and there’s no feedback from the poor – whether they’re satisfied or not, whether their money even reached them or not. There’s no accountability on the part of these official aid agencies for whether they got the money to the poor, whether they made the poor better off by getting them a drink of clean water when they previously didn’t have access to clean water. Or by getting them an essential immunization to prevent their child from getting measles. Or to get them a bed net to prevent them from getting bit by a malarial mosquito. There’s no accountability for these basic things, and so these basic things don’t happen. Where there are no incentives and no accountability, then that’s another insight of economics. And then that doesn’t happen, and that’s indeed what has happened in foreign aid tragically”..

According to Economist and emeritus Professor Wolfgang Kasper ‘A major cause for the rising tide of graft is foreign aid. Aid rarely reaches the poor and is rarely cost-effective. Despite assertions by well-paid foreign-aid lobbyists, unconditional foreign aid has failed. Thus, huge aid flows to Africa have only rewarded incompetent despots and kleptocratic elites, whereas absolute poverty has plummeted in India and China, countries which have received comparatively little foreign aid. In countries which derive over half their national budget from foreign aid transfers — as is now the case in many African and South Pacific countries — genuine democracy has no chance.’ ‘My analysis shows that entrenched corruption occurs in countries with poorly protected private property rights, over-regulated markets, and a poor rule of law. In addition, two other factors contribute to the rising tide in bribe-taking: oil and gas wealth; and Western military intervention in Afghanistan, East Timor and Iraq resulting in highly corrupt regimes –– and with it many angry young men and hence political instability.’ Countries that have the least amount of corruption have high standards of probity in government, writes Kasper. Examples of these countries include Singapore, Estonia and Chile, and Australia. Some countries — including the United States, France and Japan — have had some corruption, but poor countries tend to be more corrupt than affluent countries. ‘Many Third-world societies are still entrapped in a bleak cycle of corruption, injustice and dire poverty,’

While I agree that sometimes these “wonderful, well-intentioned endeavors to build wells or latrines in less-developed communities” result in “only ephemeral benefit”, there are certainly organizations out there using charitable contributions highly effectively.

As donors, it is our job to determine which organizations are A) addressing the greatest need, and B) spending contributions as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Bright Funds (www [dot] Brightfunds [dot] org) , an online giving platform for donors to contribute to mutual funds of nonprofits has developed an in depth process for researching and selecting nonprofits. This way when a donor contributes to a “fund” of nonprofits, they can rest assured that their donation does have a real impact.

Many of the organizations in the Bright Funds Water Fund and Poverty Funds, for example, are not the kind of aid organizations described in this article. These organizations emphasize sustainability in their approach– collaborating with local communities and governments, and providing skills training instead of goods and services.